This completes the reassignment of roles of the three Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellites following the launch of Meteosat-10 on 5 July.
After being replaced in January by Meteosat-10 as the prime operational satellite supplying full disk images of Europe and Africa, Meteosat-9 now provides the RSS, delivering more frequent images every five minutes over Europe only. The two-satellite system continues the services previously delivered by Meteosat-8 and -9 in support of weather forecasters in one of their most challenging tasks, nowcasting, which involves detecting and monitoring rapidly developing high impact weather like thunderstorms or fog and issuing related warnings up to 12 hours ahead.
Meanwhile, the residual capabilities of the ageing Meteosat-8 are being assessed to determine how far it can serve as a backup for Meteosat-9 and -10.